Talked my friend out of a "gaming laptop" and into letting me build her a desktop. Trying to take advantage of some of those "Black Friday" deals. I will buy parts over the weekend(into monday), while waiting on other parts that aren't on sale yet in hopes that they will be sometime this weekend.
Budget $850(ish), moderate gaming @ 1920x1080 resolution for now. Buyer wanted a future proof rig that will last several years. She will not be doing any extreme overclocking. I will do some light OC'ing on the CPU on the stock cooler for now at the buyers request. Managed to somewhat color coordinate everything at the buyers request(She doesn't want conflicting colors)
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks
CPU: Intel Core i5-3570K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($169.99 @ Microcenter)
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 Pro3 ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($94.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: G.Skill Value 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($34.49 @ Newegg)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: OCZ Vertex 4 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($74.99 @ Newegg)
Video Card: XFX Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB Video Card ($231.98 @ Newegg)
Case: Thermaltake Commander MS/I Snow Edition (White/Black) ATX Mid Tower Case ($52.22 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: PC Power & Cooling Silencer MK III 500W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V Power Supply ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Lite-On ihes112-04 Blu-Ray Reader, DVD/CD Writer ($54.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $813.63
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2012-11-22 03:47 EST-0500)